Paralympian Jaryd Clifford has an inspiring message for all runners

Welcome to Healthy Thank you tuning in listeners, Nice to have you. You are listening to the daily podcast from Body and Soul. I am Felicity Harley and it is Para Olympic time and to celebrate, I am joined by one of our most successful Paralympians, Jared Clifford. He's about to embark on his third Paralympics. He is already a three time Paralympic medalist, two times world champion Nike athlete.

No, thanks for having me.

It's I'm really excited to have a chat, and yeah, it's been good.

Coming over to Europe.

Missing the Australian winter and training has been ramping up not long ago.

Now it's all getting real.

Yeah, thanks for rubbing that in For the rest of us who are who aren't having growth summer, How are you feeling about Paris? What are the nerves like are you? Are you getting there? Are getting excited?

I'm overwhelmingly the emotion is excitement. It's nervous excitement for sure, but it's the kind of nerves that you can harness for you know, a good performance, Whereas I definitely have approached Paralympics in the past with a lot of nerves that might be cast as a burden. So I'm just so excited to be able to have another opportunity to

So yeah, just overwhelmingly excited.

Tell us a bit about your Paralympic event. What is it exactly?

Yeah, so I'm a Paralympic middle and long distance runner, so I compete in the fifth hundred meters in the five thousand meters predominantly. I did do the marathon a couple of years ago at the Paralympics, but that's been put on the back burner for this one.

So we're just on the track.

So I compete in the category that is T twelve slash thirteen. That means that I'm visually impaired, and I compete against other athletes that are visually impaired. Athletes that are totally blind to compete in a separate category against similarly impaired people, So at the Paralympics, we only compete against people of the same or similar disability, and so

So because some of those events have people running with them, but you don't.

Do you. Yeah, So my category has the option to use guide runners. So in the fifteen hundred meters, which is a lot faster and shorter than say the five k, I'll run that solo. But in the five thousand meters at these games, I'll be using two guide runners. They'll switch it halfway and we're connected by a fifteen centimeter tether, so we have to be in sync, almost like a three legged race, but connected at the hand.

And so they will.

Give me all the information that an everyday runner would receive.

Just by looking.

So they'll tell me things like what position I'm coming, laps to go splits, which athletes are in front of me, because that will dictate what tactics I do, the gap between athletes are on the track, and just making sure that I can get absolutely everything out of myself without needing to think about seeing to get around the track, and I get to run without any hesitancy or run without any fear into this hard to see space in front of me, and I can do that just going

Yeah, you must have an incredible amount of trust in them.

Yeah, it's definitely trust.

So the two guys like Tim Logan, who's been training with me since I was twelve and I'm twenty five now. So we've run I think we've calculated thirty to thirty five thousand kilometers together. He lives with me, he is, you know, we've spent a lot of time together, and.

I definitely you know, when I cross the.

Road and I'm running with him, I'm quite literally trusting you with my life when we do that. And so the other guide is Matt Clark. He's an Olympian and he'll be going to his second Olympics in the steeple chase, and so he's doubling back. He won't be celebrating too hard, too quickly because yeah, he'll be coming to the Paralympics as well. So you know, we're all best mates, all three of us. So it's just such a special thing

But beyond the same team, I think it's really exciting.

That's phenomenal. Now you've been to Rio in Beijing. Oh sorry, Tokyo. What learnings are you going to take from those Paralympics into Paris.

There's so many different lessons, you know.

I was seventeen when I went to Rio, and it was all about soaking up the atmosphere, learning as much as possible. I remember putting my foot down on the start line when we called to our marks, and you kind of put weight through that front leg before the gun goes, and I couldn't put any weight through it because it was shaking so much.

That's how nervous I was, and.

Never run in front of the crowd like that. All I could think about was, you know, what if I come last?

What happens if I fall over? What are the kids at school got to say?

Because I was still in like year eleven and I was, you know, thinking a lot about that and it was a great experience.

But the lesson from that was that.

I've got to think about the process, not the outcome, Like that's got to be how I think about things, because if you focus on the process, the outcome will sort itself out, So that was the big lesson from that, and then the big lesson from Tokyo. I went in his favorite in three events as either reigning wheel champion or world record holder, and I came away with two silvers and a bronze, which I was obviously super proud of, but did fall short of the dream that I'd held

An end, the end being the dream.

I had to remember that I actually have this dream because I had fallen in love with the sport as a kid, So the falling in love with the sport had actually come before the dream, and so I guess it was just reminding myself of that and going back to the basics and why I loved it and making sure training wasn't just yeah, it means to an end, it was actually something that I enjoyed doing. So I think over the last three years, I've definitely done that. Yeah.

Now, we did well meet at the Nike Running Summit, and you gave an incredible answer to a question there about the Paralympics and the Olympics being one event. What's your view on this.

Yeah, it's something we get asked quite a lot, particularly off the back of the Commonwath Games recently appearing to kind of synthesize the two events, which isn't quite true. The Commonwath Games have a tiny, tiny amount of power events and the Gold Coast twenty eighteen that wasn't actually a new thing. It was just that the medals counted to the metal tally for the first time.

So I don't think they should be combined.

I think that the Paralympics on its own is very important for sport, very important for the world because it is the only time where disability is front center for two weeks. Is it's not overshadowed by Yusain Bolt or Simone Biles.

It is prime time just focus on disability.

And because I think it's important because the Paralympics as a sporting spectacle also provides us a two week window into how the world should be for all people with disabilities. The Paralympics shows us what people disabilities can do when they're given the support and resources to excel.

So if it shows it.

If we were to give the support and resources to people's disabilities to excel in all aspects of life, all throughout society, not just the ones that love doing sport, then imagine what's possible. And if the Paralympics and the Olympics were combined, we would lose, we would lose that window that we get given into this kind of utopian world that I think does have a chance to exist. So I think it's very important that the Paralympics stays

Well. Thank you for championing us at the Paralympics and.

For coming on healthy, Thanks for having.

Hey, thanks for listening to this chat with Jared, and yes, make sure you watch his races the Paralympics on now on Channel nine on nine. Now I know where I'll be glued to this weekend, and I hope you will